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Confession, Fiction, and the South African State Tim Conley

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Confession, Fiction, and the South African State Tim Conley Captive Audience: Confession, Fiction, and the South African State Tim Conley Even during the period of detention I had been allowed to write. It was something I could not ignore. A voice said, 'Write,' and I wrote. Breyten Breytenbach, True Confessions (156) I am a captive audience, literally Albie Sachs, The Jail Diary ofAlbie Sachs (132) Confession as an imperative has a central, if not always comforting, role in modern South African culture. Apartheid laws and regulations demanded that citizens identify themselves (by race, by issued pass, by ideology, etc.) before its figures of authority, and those who did not answer the call to satisfaction—satisfaction determined, it is very impor• tant to bear in mind, not by the structure of confessional discourse but entirely by the agency of the confessor—were subjected to the more rig• orous techniques of 'inquiry' practiced in the privacy of police stations and prisons. By contrast, post-apartheid South Africa has developed an entirely different mode of confession (though still imperative) in the mandate of its ambitious and controversial Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The appropriation of religious doctrinal practice and lan• guage for purposes of social justice affirms both Foucault's general ob• servations about spiritual resuscitation through corporeal punishment in his foundational work, Discipline and Punish, as well as the suggestion of Michael Lapsley, a priest expelled from South Africa in 1986 and the wounded survivor of a letter bomb four years later: "part of our debate and national discourse has always been, and still is, about theology" (Boraine et al. 28). 61 Tim Conley Aquinas, in considering the beauty of the spiritual life, posits that the penitent is ashamed not "of the act of confessing but of the sin which confession reveals" (268). The process is itself beyond criticism. "Through the confession," notes Foucault of legal confession, "the ac• cused himself took part in the ritual of producing penal truth" (38).1 Yet, at least in part because, as Dennis A. Foster puts it, "the very dis• course of representation as expression is symptomatic of the desire for a language that will make the writer the master of his meanings" (2). The confessional fiction of a writer like Breyten Breytenbach operates sub- versively as fictional confession: the exact narrative shape which the op• pressor dictates and expects to be parroted is turned inside-out. "Penal truth" is thus distinguished from "truth." In the discussion which fol• lows I shall examine how writers like Breytenbach and Albie Sachs sub• vert the process of penal confession by themselves redefining a confes• sional form (anti-confession?); but, further, for a decent appreciation of such subversions, the said discussion needs to be bracketed by consid• erations of the respective ideologies and methods which produced the apartheid-era penal confession and the present hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I Describe your relationships to me. Tell me about what is veiled. Admit even to that which you don't know. Breytenbach, True Confessions (59) In the fashion in which Foucault suggests that "discipline organizes an analytical space" (143), I would suggest that the penal confession, by which I mean the confession yielded by police interrogation within the apartheid penal system (as distinct from the anti- and post-apartheid confessional strategies discussed later), limits the space, confines the analysand. The system of penal confession within South Africa endows its captive audience (and captive performer) with no choice but "a cer• tain asceticism: they must, at certain moments at least, confront tempta- 62 Captive Audience: Confession, Fiction, and the South African State tion and perhaps the severity of God alone" (Foucault 143). God is, of course, on the side of the panoptic guardians of the prisoner. This necessary solitude, as Foucault outlines it, is integral to such a rough practice: the penitent must be made to understand that he/she is alone against forces great in number and irrepressible in their need for the "truth" to be told to them. Any relationships outside of the confessor-penitent (interrogator-prisoner) duologue, which pretends to be a monologue, would only interfere with the process and must therefore (the good Mr Investigator may reason) be carefully prevented. In a 1976 United Nations investigation of conditions at the infamous Robben Island, torture, abuse, black slavery, malnutrition, and lack of proper medical attention were found; but, it was noted how such meth• ods operate within an incommunicado space. Communication between prisoners themselves, between prisoners and legal counsel, and with the outside world is described by the U.N. report as "virtually non-exis• tent": "the legal restrictions and their actual application created a situ• ation wherein detailed discussion of specific violations of human rights was fruitless" (7). Within the apartheid penal method and system, con• fession is the dominant discourse, because it is the only discourse, at least officially. There are, to be sure, limited possibilities for subversion within the system. Consider, for example, the autobiographical writ• ings of Albie Sachs. Once an outspoken dissident who endured im• prisonment, exile, and an assassination attempt, Sachs now serves as a judge on the South African Constitutional Court. This reversal of for• tune is entirely emblematic of the significant change in value the con• fession has undergone in the nation's past decade. Sachs's Jail Diary, far from an admission of criminal guilt or renunciation of the author's past acts, is a confession of the humanity of and within the unjust system of discipline and punishment. Sachs relates incidents of uneven relation• ships within prisons, like the connection with his "whistler" (20-6) and the Bible talks with the station commander: "it occurs to me that the station commander may be almost as lonely for company as I am" (134). Apartheid's specious divisions generate only an equality of lone- 63 Tim Conley liness, embodied in the polarized positions of commander and prisoner and their constrained means of interaction: the criminal confession. In his editorial guise, offering "A Note on the Relationship between Detainee and Interrogator," Breytenbach criticizes both the "preor• dained roles" of prisoner and interrogator—"this macabre dance, this fatal game"—and the horrible "normality" of the person who can assume the latter role {True Confessions 341-42). This is part of a ter• rific broadside to the notion of modern enlightenment. Where the con• fessor may assume airs of tolerance and even piety ("they will at most consider theirs to be 'a necessary if dirty job"') in an abusive system in which "more advanced technologies have merely brought a greater sophistication to the methods employed" {True Confessions 342). Such observations frequently resound in Foucault: In a disciplinary régime [...] individualization is "descending": as power becomes more anonymous and more functional, those on whom it is exercised tend to be more strongly individ• ualized; it is exercised by surveillance rather than ceremonies, by observation rather than commemorative accounts, by com• parative measures that have the "norm" as reference rather than genealogies giving ancestors as points of reference; by "gaps" rather than deeds. (193) The obvious "gap" for the apartheid regime is its centralized racism, but this is a wider gap than a study of European prison formations might anticipate. Differentiations from this model will be noted shortly. The "gap" becomes internalized, so that the uncriminal "norm" of apartheid signifies accuracy—true, redemptive confession—and anything else is just an absence. Michael K, the outsider protagonist of Coetzee's novel, Life & Times of Michael K, is haunted by this gap in his self-understand• ing: Always, when he tried to explain himself to himself, there re• mained a gap, a hole, a darkness before which his understand- 64 Captive Audience: Confession, Fiction, and the South African State ing baulked, into which it was useless to pour words. The words were eaten up, the gap remained. His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong. (110)2 The investigator's persona, or the confessor's presence, is itself internal• ized. The penitent prisoner is trapped in a cyclical confessional mode, with nothing to do but, Listen how being locked up grinds. Talk to self. (Breytenbach, Judas Eye 20) Foucault continues, in even more turgid language, to speculate on the optimum scheme for punitive panopticism: The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite dis• cipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet in infinity. (227) The "analytical space" of apartheid offers such an ideal—selective to• talitarianism—in which its discontents are scrutinized not only as if under a microscope but even more intimately: Breytenbach never fails 65 Tim Conley to characterize the "meticulous and ever more analytical observation" as coprophagic. "I am your control.
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